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Thursday, June 12, 2014

`Then There Will Be Nothing I Know'

Only
vanity keeps me quiet, as it never has before. Mustn’t acknowledge those memory
lapses, gaps all the more irksome because I know
I know that nugget of fact, and can fit a name to that face, or at least I used
to. Tell me, who sang “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love”? Who was FDR’s first vice
president? And where are the car keys? I’ve looked for a pattern in forgetting.
Could it be temporal, memories beginning in a certain year growing threadbare? Not
likely, at least not yet. I remember my childhood telephone number, the
combination to my locker in junior high school, scads of Latin verb
conjugations, and the name of every teacher I’ve ever had. Could memories without
emotional content, if there is such a thing, be hardest hit? Nothing. We cover
up such lacunae with self-deprecating humor, hoping they’re as meaningless as
we pretend they are. What we once consigned resignedly to “senility” in others is
now self-diagnosed, with a laugh, as “early-onset Alzheimer’s.” Even the “early”
is self-serving. The horror of dementia, a sort of living death, may outweigh fear
of the real thing. Baby-Boomers are a notoriously self-involved bunch.

Here
is a Larkin poem dating from 1978, after he had mostly stopped writing poems.
He turned fifty-six that year, and had another seven years to live. “The Winter
Palace” was first published in CollectedPoems (1988):

“Most
people know more as they get older:

I
give all that the cold shoulder.

“I
spent my second quarter-century

Losing
what I had learnt at university

“And
refusing to take in what had happened since.

Now
I know none of the names in the public prints.

“And
am starting to give offence by forgetting faces

And
swearing I've never been in certain places.

“It
will be worth it, if in the end I manage

To
blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

“Then
there will be nothing I know.

My
mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.”

The
first three stanzas are familiar Larkin, contrary and amusing, poking fun at his
philistine self. The dawning sense of horror begins with the fourth. The fifth stanza
suggests a familiar rationalization – that the loss of memory will cancel our
awareness of its loss, and so we’ll hover in pain-free ignorance. Not likely,
knowing what I’ve seen of diagnosed Alzheimer’s. I used to sit with the mother
of a friend when he and his wife wanted a night out. The old lady sat
motionless for hours in a chair. Her eyes shifted and I could see her
breathing, but she seemed otherwise inert, an impression that at first was
disturbing, as though I were sitting with a corpse, and guilt-inducing. At some
point I turned on the television and found reruns of Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music. Something reached the old woman. She patted her knee with her hand in
time to the music. “The true art of memory is the art of attention.”